Saturday, 19 March 2016

RETURN TO THE ENCHANTED CITY

We had a fine day out at Ironworks Road last Saturday, quite literally. Contrary to all expectations, coats were shed and sunglasses sported as the sun smiled down on a game that included a 50/50 tackle so ferocious I swear to God I heard the ball screaming.

Later in the week I went into my local bank.
Woman behind the counter: 'By, your very brown. Have you been skiing?'
Me: 'No. I was in Tow Law on Saturday.'

Today I am taking The Professor on his annual pilgrimage to see Olga.

Here is a shorter, edited version of a piece that appeared in issue 19 of The Blizzard. If you want to read it all have a look here: https://www.theblizzard.co.uk/product/issue-nineteen/

When former Northern Ireland and Middlesbrough winger Terry
Cochrane signed for South Bank in 1992 the Teesside non-League club had
problems. Thieves got in the ground at night, lifted tools from the shed, forced
entry to the club house, fled with booze. The Bankers took measures. They
bought a powerful Rottweiler. When training ended for the day, they let him
loose and locked the gates. That night thieves broke in again, stole the dog.

That’s South Bank, Terry Cochrane said, fella has two ears
they think he’s a cissy.

South Bank lies three miles east of Middlesbrough. Locally
they call it Slaggy Island in honour of the ring of spoil heaps that once cut
it off from the outside world. It’s not as glamourous as that nickname makes it
sound. South Bank was the home of the Smith’s Dock shipyard, of Bolckow Vaughan
and Dorman Long steelworks, clusters of iron foundries, warrens of brickyards.
Blast furnaces, smelters, rolling mills and fabrication sheds converted ore to
pig iron, iron to steel. They shaped it, cut it, and shipped it out. Through
most of the 20th Century Slaggy Islanders lived their lives under a
cloud of bitter smog. You had to catch a bus to see the sun.

Yet there was a power and a magic to it. The sparks off arc
welders and angle-grinders danced in the darkness and at night the sky was dyed
a dirty orange and pulsed like a heart. When South Bank’s most celebrated son,
Wilf Mannion called
his hometown ‘the enchanted city’ he wasn’t being ironic.

South Bank FC was founded in 1868, the first football club
in the North East of England. The Ellis Cup, was launched - as the South Bank
Amateur Challenge Cup – in 1889, which makes it either the fourth or fifth
oldest football competition on the planet (the Northern League –of which South
Bank was a founder member – began the same year).

Originally for under-18 teams, the Ellis Cup soon expanded
to include senior sides too, not just from South Bank but from across Teesside
and down into the mining villages of the North York Moors and Cleveland Hills.
Over the next century over 100 players who’d turn pro played in it, amongst
them some of the most influential figures in the English game.

George Elliott, my grandfather’s boyhood hero, played in the
Ellis Cup for Redcar Crusaders, signed for South Bank shortly afterwards , then
for Middlesbrough. Aided by two other Ellis Cup Slaggy Islanders, the Carr
brothers, Jackie and Willie, Elliott hit 31 goals in 32 league matches in
1913/14 helping Boro to third place in the English top flight, the club’s highest
ever finish.

George Hardwick’s father worked in the ironstone mines of
East Cleveland. The mine shut down. Money was so short it
could crawl under a duck. Hardwick’s mother picked up old jumpers, pulled the yarn apart
and knitted George a red jersey and matching socks to play his football in. He
turned out in the Ellis Cup for Saltburn, moved on to South bank, signed for
Middlesbrough in 1937. A cultured full-back, Hardwick had a matinee idol
moustache and the face and physique to match. When he smiled women’s legs
turned to jelly. My Granddad called him ‘Gorgeous George’ and blew sarky kisses
to him from the Ayresome Park chicken run. Hardwick laughed off the abuse. He
captained club and country, people whispered happily of an affair with a Hollywood
‘It Girl’ : Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, accounts varied.

The Golden Boy, Wilf Mannion was born in Napier Street,
South Bank. Mannion won the Ellis Cup with South Bank St Peter’s when he
was sixteen. His side played South Bank East End in the final. East End’s
stopper got no closer to the blond inside-forward than kicking the ball into
his groin. The stopper’s name was Harold Shepherdson. Three decades later, as
Alf Ramsey’s assistant he’d be leaping off the bench at Wembley when Geoff
Hurst scored England’s fourth, the manager barking ‘Sit down, Harold, I can’t
see,’ at his back.

The influence of Slaggy Island’s football trophy spread far
beyond Teesside. Future Leeds United capo, Don Revie played in the Ellis Cup
for Middlesbrough Swifts. Man United boss, Matt Busby, a serviceman at
Catterick Garrison, helped Portrack Shamrocks defeat Cargo Fleet Home Guard in
the 1946 final. Ken Furphy turned out for Stockton West End, went pro with
Everton, achieved great things coaching Watford and ended up in the USA in the
1970s managing New York Cosmos, pairing Pele with Giorgio Chinaglia up front.

My friend’s Dad was the goalkeeper for the village team.
Years later he’d recall an Ellis Cup match against Great Broughton – managed in
those days by the village postmistress Nancy Goldsborough - when a shiny-eyed
teenage centre forward banged in a hat-trick and at the final whistle wandered
over, patted my friend’s Dad on the arm, told him ‘One day, when I’m playing
for England, you’ll brag to your mate’s about this,’ smiled and introduced
himself, ‘I’m Brian Clough.’

‘If he hadn’t been so little, I’d have planted him,’ my
friend’s Dad said, telling the story for the thousandth time.

From the late seventies onwards hardship battered Teesside.
The steelworks and the shipyards shut. The population of South Bank dwindled.
Shutters went up over doors and windows, shops closed, derelict streets were
bulldozed. Football clung on. Barely.

After Terry Cochrane quit, South Bank’s ground was attacked routinely
and severely. Vandals smashed the windows. Arsonists burned down the clubhouse,
torched the main stand. Somebody took a sledgehammer to the dugouts, carted off
the bricks. By the late 1990s the pitch was three feet deep in grass, a stadium
that had once held 8,000 for cup ties looked like a bomb site. Unable to fulfil
fixtures, the Bankers had long since been suspended from the Northern League
they’d co-founded.

Now there’s a community centre, named Golden Boy Green in
honour of Wilf Mannion where the ground once stood. There’s a skateboard park
and a basketball court, no football, no memorial. These days South Bank FC play
at Harcourt Road sharing the pitch with Eston Villa and Middlesbrough Homeless.
They’re in the Stockton Sunday League. In 2015 they got to the final of the
Ellis Cup, won it in a penalty shoot-out against North Ormesby Cons.

Harry, please all them 'The North Yorkshire Moors', they've got bugger all to do with York. Wherever that is. I'm sure when you went up Clay bank on the United bus to Chop gate, Fangdale Beck and Helmsley the sign said North Yorkshire Moors National Park.

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(Thanks to Kevin Donnelly for the photo)

About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.